Even without knowing that sleep is the most important thing you can do regularly to keep yourself healthy, you already know the consequences of not getting enough sleep on a normal day. First of all is the issue of concentration. If you don’t get enough sleep during the night, you may be unable to focus on anything for the whole day. Moreover, you may get sick easily because stress on the body caused by lack of sleep could greatly compromise the immune system. Some research say that those people who don’t get enough sleep are more sickly than those who regularly sleep on time every day.
If we focus primarily on our health, sleeping must be a close second when it comes to prioritizing what we need to do to live healthy. Sleeping every night should come before consuming huge amounts of fruits and veggies, taking some good nutritional supplements, getting adequate exercise, and not being subjected to too much stress.
It is no secret that being in a financial crisis has made people lose more sleep because they’re taking on new jobs on top of the old ones, but the thing is that we need to get our fill of sleep to stay healthy. The long term effects of sleep deprivation are staggering. You know you owe yourself the sleep you badly need if your body starts showing signs of hypertension, diabetes and heart ailments. Some say that adding 3 or 4 hours in a week to your normal sleeping patterns could greatly reduce the occurrence of these diseases.
So, how much sleep do we need, exactly? A child who is 6-12 years old should get 10 to 12 hours of sleep daily. A teenager will require less sleep, but still should rest for 9 hours at least every night. An adult can settle for 7 hours of sleep every night.
How about daytime snoozing? It’s a lot better to rest during the night time because your body can restore the melatonin levels naturally. These pigments are what causes your circadian rhythm to be the way it is. If you habitually sleep during the day, your body won’t be able to replenish its melatonin supply fast enough. The result is you won’t be able to sleep normally during the night time, and become an insomniac. The hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. are ideal for sleeping.
Melatonin is a natural hormone generated by your body’s pineal gland. The hormone is secreted during night-time to make you sleepy. This is the body’s natural way of doing a “re-boot”. You see, your body craves sleep and even if you’d rather spend most of your time being busy with something else, your body cannot deny itself the sleep it needs. Thus melatonin is secreted to make sleep come naturally. If you insist on not sleeping however, your melatonin supply is depleted.
Besides being a sleep synchronizer, melatonin is more famous for being an antioxidant. That the body produces it naturally during the night time should tell you something. The body protects itself and uses sleep as the best time to produce copious amounts of the body’s antioxidant.
If you’re like everyone else, you have good nights and bad nights. The fact is, you can’t fall asleep when you’re supposed to. But, you fall asleep when you’re not supposed to, like at work and while you’re supposed to be spending some quality time with the family. Things get really sticky when you try not to catch up on your sleep. Then, you get cranky and out-of-sorts.
If only you can sleep at night. No need to stress about your night time problems. It’s not like you’re the only one with the same problem. People have been battling with insomnia and end up taking high doses of sedatives, endangering themselves by self medicating. Here’s what you do… don’t self-medicate without knowing exactly what’s going on.
What you need to do is find out what’s keeping you awake. I don’t mean psychiatrist, I mean real tests that tell you a lot about the physiology of your sleeping problems. Sleep disorders involve any difficulties related to sleeping, including difficulty falling or staying asleep, falling asleep at inappropriate times, excessive total sleep time, or abnormal behaviors associated with sleep. The hundreds of various disorders of sleeping and waking can be grouped as follows: difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying awake, difficulty adhering to a regular sleep schedule and sleep disruptive behavior.
Some diagnostic sleep studies provided by physicians are easy enough to understand. The most common are the ones that watch what happens to the body during sleep. The most common sleep studies or diagnostic procedures include the Polysomnogram, Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) and Multiple Wake Test (MWT).
You may be requested to take polysomnograms to investigate your sleep patterns. You may have to do this in the sleep laboratory. During this time, you will be told not to drink or eat anything that could disrupt your test, such as naps, coffee and alcohol. This test is significant because it records several body functions during sleep.
When you’re inside a sleeping room, some monitoring devices will be hooked on you. This is merely a way to collect information. The sensors all over your body will tell the doctors about your brain waves (EEG activity), heart rate (EKG), eye movements, leg muscle activity, and chest and stomach movement during sleep. The way air flows out from your nose and mouth will also be monitored. Most of all, your blood oxygen level will be monitored using sensors that are clipped on to your finger.
For special cases, other factors may be monitored. A series of wavefront tracings will be the output of the test and your doctor can consult with you to tell you about the score for your test. This diagnostic process could just save your life in the long run. Fortunately it ends around six o’clock in the morning and you can return to your usual daytime routine.
There are other tests you can take such as the MSLT test, which measures how long it takes for a person to fall asleep during naps taken over the course of a day; and the multiple wake test, which measures the ability to stay awake for a duration and is given during the day;
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